I come from a long line of artists and teachers. That's not incidental — it's the whole story.

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My formative years were spent at the arts center: painting, drawing, ceramics, then piano and voice lessons, then every school musical I could get myself into. I had parents and teachers who took my creative life seriously. I made the most of it. When I got to college and tried to set all of that aside for a "real" career, it lasted about a year. Theatre took over again — on campus, off campus, an internship with the legendary Broadway producer Alexander Cohen, stage management for every theatre club I could find, and work backstage on an Off-Broadway production of Chess. My passion wasn't subtle, even to me.

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What followed was a career that built itself, almost organically, around the intersection of art, institution, and impact — TheatreWorksUSA in New York, Broadway and Off-Broadway, and then two roles that changed everything.

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As Program Director for the Columbia University Arts Initiative, I learned what becomes possible when an institution decides that creativity is not an amenity but a core function. As an Arts Policy Advisor at the National Endowment for the Arts, I found a language — and a framework — for something I had always felt but never quite been able to name.

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Here is what I believe, and what I have staked my career on: The arts are not a luxury.

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They are civic infrastructure, as essential as roads, schools, or housing. When a community invests in arts and culture, it is investing in the conditions that make everything else possible — connection, meaning, resilience, and the capacity to imagine something different than what currently exists. And when words are not enough, when communities are divided, when fear has silenced the people most affected — art has always found a way through.

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I also believe, deeply, in what artists bring to leading. Creative people are trained to hold ambiguity, stay curious under pressure, and sit with a problem long enough to find an answer that didn't exist before they started. These are precisely the capacities that leaders in every sector most urgently need right now.

Creative Leadership Lab exists because I wanted to do this work at the highest level — and to help other leaders do the same: to bring the discipline and openness of artistic practice into the rooms where decisions get made, and to build the kind of creative and cultural infrastructure that allows communities to actually thrive.

 

This is the work I was made for. I'm glad you found your way here.